Saturday was Pauline's birthday party, so we skipped Furry on Friday in the interests of being awake for Sat evening ;) We headed into London at about lunchtime, and were pleased to see that the trains were running properly & that the tube closures didn't actually affect anywhere we were going. We'd been thinking about going to the video games exhibition that the Science Museum has at the moment, but as the website was suggesting we should buy tickets in advance we decided maybe the first day of the exhibition wasn't the best day to just try turning up ;) Instead we went to the National Gallery - I don't think I've been since going there at the end of day-trips to London with my parents, when I was kid. We only went round 4 rooms - North Italy, Germany & the Netherlands in 1500-1600 (so da Vinci, Holbein and Bosch & friends were the themes), and a set of four paintings themed on the 4 elements in food terms. So Air had lots of fowl, Earth was all vegetables etc. Unfortunately, I've forgotten who the artist was.

We managed to time it just right so that picture saturation was reached at the time that we needed to move on & find the others. It took us a little while to find the restuarant (the map on the website was not entirely accurate) & we were looking for somewhere bigger ;) We turned up first & after a call to Ainsley to check numbers we 'grabbed a table' ... the guy in the restuarant was somewhat startled when we said we'd have 11 turning up, the whole restuarant only seated 15! It'd been a while since J & I had had sushi, so we went for a mixed selection plus an inside out spicy tuna roll, so that we could have a varied meal.

Pauline was after coffee & cake next - and after a bit of a walk Marcus managed to find us a cafe that was still open. I'd eaten too much at dinner, so no cake for me, but everyone else managed to find space for various evil looking dessert things ;) And then we were off to pick up Pete & his girlfriend at a tube station, and thence to a pub. J and I had to run off fairly soon after that, which was a shame, but it's a long way back to Ipswich. It was a nice evening, good food, good company :)

Sunday was, unsurprisingly, lazy. And involved rather too much red wine, but that wasn't for any special reason ;) Some Quake 4 in the afternoon (though on public servers as we couldn't get enough people together for a game on ours), and some Torchwood in the evening. We rather liked Torchwood, though I'm beginning to wonder given what I've read online if that's partly because we didn't immediately start going "that's like that episode of Angel" "that's like that bit in Buffy" "that's like that film" etc etc. Sometimes it's good not to be well up on pop culture, maybe? I wasn't so keen on the storyline for the second episode (they showed 2 last night), but other than that I enjoyed it & we're planning on continuing watching.